I wanna be the whole world's girl

Sitting up on the roof of her trailer, smoking her last Parliament, peering through the smog of the August twilight, Lizzy Grant can just about see the spire of the Chrysler Building. It’s blinking out a message for her, she’s sure, if only she could tune into its wavelength.

It’s August 2008, her last Saturday night in the Manhattan Mobile Home trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey. She’s packed up her guitar, her tinsel and her streamers, her pictures of Marilyn and Elvis and her aquarium with the fake fish. She’s given her plastic blue hydrangeas to her neighbour Manuel, and she’s given her college books - Beyond Good and Evil, The Confessions of St Augustine - to Dixie down the street. All her possessions fit in a couple of cardboard boxes from the 7-Eleven. Now she’s waiting for her ride into the city, and for her next chapter to begin.

She’s been here in the trailer park less than a year, but she feels transformed. When Martha the landlady helped her move her stuff in last October she was a bleach blonde 22 year old, with a couple of years of open-mic slots behind her and a Macbook full of garageband demos and old John Waters movies. Now she’s a college graduate (BA in Philosophy from Fordham University) and has recorded an honest-to-goodness debut album.

Every day for three months, through the freezing New York winter, she took the train over the river into the meatpacking district, and sat down with David Kahne, this old guy who’s produced everyone from Tony Bennett to Paul McCartney (not to mention Regina Spektor and the Strokes). From 3pm to 3am she sang her heart out, trying to make these songs written on her crappy little acoustic guitar sound like the music she heard in her head. Something like Marilyn singing happy birthday for President Elvis, maybe? Orchestrated by Lee Hazlewood and Brian Wilson, with backing vocals by the Flamingos? Then she’d walk into the night, through the village and out over the Williamsburg Bridge, listening to Tony Robbins telling her how to AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN, and sit in an all-night diner, picking for hours at a slice of chocolate cake and waiting for her boyfriend to wake up. 

But the best moments were the mornings before the studio,  lying in bed, daydreaming, weaving together her homespun videos from old super 8 clips, vintage ads, 1930s cartoons, and jazz documentaries. The trailer park is quiet in the mornings, apart from the kids racing on their tricycles. It’s the first time she’s ever had a place of her own and she relishes the space to breathe, to dream. When she was a boozy, wayward teen her parents stuck her in a boarding school out in the middle of Connecticut, full of the rich and the clueless. Nobody out here cares what her dad does, where she went to school or what her plans after college are. She’s free to reinvent herself.

She sucks deep on her Parliament and blows smoke into the blue New York night. For all the progress she’s made, she knows there’s still something missing. There’s certainly not a whole lot of shaking going on at her record company, 5 Points. Yes, they’ve paid for 10 months in the trailer park and three months in David Kahne’s studio, but the record’s been done for six months and they still don’t seem to have a clue what to do with it. Maybe signing with a guy, David Nichtern, whose major claims to fame are writing “Midnight at the Oasis”, and composing the music for the perennial US soap, As the World Turns, was not her smartest decision?

And the more she listens to Kahne’s sober, tidy and polite production, the more it already sounds dated, like a record made in 2007 - a MySpace album for pity’s sake! - rather than the woozy, cinemascope, technicolour extravaganza she had her heart set on. 

Whatever it is, Lizzy has a big fucking problem coming over the hill, and its name is Stefani Germanotta. Just a couple of years ago she shared downtown stages and showcases with this kid, an upper west-side theater-camp dork. Now she’s in LA, swanning around, calling herself “Lady Gaga”, and is already well on her way to her first number one record. The record is an embarrassment, but the transformation is spectacular - the scrappy little brunette has willed herself into an electroclash dominatrix, with a platinum blonde wig not a million miles from Lizzy’s latest do.

It’s a classic Hollywood makeover, of the kind that Lizzy usually relishes, but right now it sticks in her craw. Of course, Lizzy herself is no stranger to self-invention. When she first arrived in New York for college back in 2005, looking like Taylor Swift’s more wholesome older sister and sounding like Linda Perhacs, she recorded a entire album of acoustic laments dedicated to Nick Drake and Elliot Smith and assumed the name “May Jailer”. 

The name didn’t stick, but Lizzy didn’t stop dreaming herself away from her past. Maybe she just needs to go further, dream harder? She flings the butt of her cigarette into the night and stares hard at the Chrysler Tower. It’s growing cooler now and she pulls her satin bomber jacket around her. She’s never liked the cold. She remembers the ferocious winters in Lake Placid when she was a kid. It’s the coldest place in America they used to say, next to Duluth (and look what that city produced). She suddenly remembers the thrill of those evenings they’d all take off in her daddy’s car, driving through the night all the way down the twinkling east coast, waking to the warmth of Florida and the Delray Beach. As her boyfriend’s car pulls up, her mind is racing and she can almost taste the oranges.